 Why are we regressing on user interface usability instead of getting better? Here is the first run setup wizard on a @Raspberry_Pi 400. There is a select box to choose your country. It has pre-selected the United States (for some reason). I want to choose Australia. Typing 'a' to jump to the top does nothing, I have to scroll-scroll-scroll to get there. 1/2 #ux 29 comments
You can try these yourself at https://infinitemac.org/1987/System%205.0 and https://infinitemac.org/1994/System%207.5  @wezm Well the map is a problem because you have to keep updating it because borders change, but yeah good list UX is important for long lists. @alilly True and there was no doubt a reason it was dropped in favour of the list. Timezone definitions also constantly change so it wouldn't be unreasonable to update the map when the TZ database was updated too. @wezm because anything involving maps is a one way ticket to political bullshit and armies of angry nationalist hackers, shills, and professional agitators. @wezm true, but doing it that way requires having and trusting NNTP. I mostly agree tho, I'd just like a search box; I should never have to do more than type "au" and select from a much shorter list. @wezm if you're interested in timezone selection interfaces, you might find my old collection over at http://n.exts.ch/2012/03/timezone_pickers interesting :-)  @wezm A well-designed user interface requires a cohesive team with good taste, yet unfortunately the free software community, and perhaps most development teams, lack both. @wezm I remember that map! It had some easter eggs as I recall, like typing "Middle of Nowhere" worked?  @wezm because linux people are dumb. Also, _we_ aren't regressing at anything because I'm not.
@wezm @Raspberry_Pi Imagine if it worked out your country from a network lookup and then preselected the right country so most people could simply confirm.  @wezm @Raspberry_Pi It's because we are no longer the customers of those products. They are not designed to please us, they are designed to please the investors, who are the real customers. But, I suspect, in this case they all live in US, so they don't care how hard it is to select a different country. @wezm @Raspberry_Pi I would guess the reason for that is just a lack of time spent on UX review and refinement. They slapped a default combo box on there and assumed the Framework (GTK?) would take care of making the UX reasonable, when it would have only taken a few more hours to make it a listbox and add a search field. Which is just bad. (Additionally, the priority on this interface may have been low as it may have been expected that most users would use the sd card preconfigurator instead) @wezm @Raspberry_Pi Dropdown menus that don't let you filter or search shouldn't exist in 2023. @wezm Dropdown menus that regress to showing you mostly blank space at the top or bottom shouldn't exist either, but GTK just can't help itself. macOS does it, too, sometimes, but GTK is really the worst offender here. @wezm This is one of those where you're supposed to hover over the large and easy to hit triangle at the top to activate the super handy auto-scroll feature. I'm guessing it also supports the emergency collapse function which you access by moving the pointer one pixel beyond the edge.  @wezm @Raspberry_Pi oh yeah I definitely was a bit annoyed by that, usually would type 'c' for Canada, but that didn't work on my Pi
 @wezm @Raspberry_Pi
regression started with the invention of the mouse, replacing thoughtfully designed key-driven interfaces with single button click click click click click  @wezm @Raspberry_Pi Who were the UI designers that decided the default birth year selector should be a drop-down menu? Related: is it wrong to assume SQLi vulns on systems which don't practice input validation on date selection? |
Gregory's Server
Attached is a screenshot of Macintosh System 5.0 released in 1987 (36 years ago). It had an interactive world map to let you set the time zone.
Later they replaced it with a simple list. The second image is System 7.5 from 1994 (29 years ago). You could type to jump within the list. And not just one character, you could type several characters and it would keep refining the match. 2/2 #ux